2 Frustrations with Google Play Music

Published: 2.24.16 · Views: 690

A quick security/privacy rant on a product I want to love.

Why Google Music?

Its real competitors are Spotify (does not support hosting my old CD library), Apple Music (I avoid Apple cloud software if I can, it is truly their weakness), Pandora (see Spotify), and Tidal (joking)? Google Music is great. Especially since rolling out their family plan, Jenny (even on her iPhone) and I can both use it for a pretty affordable price.

Flash – Security Concern

The web app for Google Play Music uses proper HTML5 audio if, and only if, you are using Chrome (or possibly a Chromium-based alternative). If one wants to stream music in Firefox, it requires the user to install Flash, a security nightmare. We are in 2016; YouTube has been all-HTML5 media for some time now. Google, please truly deprecate Flash, especially from one of your few paid services.

DoubleClick – Privacy Concern

Fig. 1. Google Play Music All Access DoubleClick Log

DoubleClick is one of Google’s advertising properties. I recognize advertising revenue powers Google, but as a paying customer of this service, why is my browser phoning home to DoubleClick so frequently? For those who do not have tools in place to block advertising networks, is Google still profiling users of a paid service via an advertising network? Figure 1 shows a uBlock Origin logger capture of all of the DoubleClick requests from a paid All Access account streaming over the course of one hour.

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Glad to know I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. I stopped using Chrome this week due to Google taking away the ability for us to disable the Wildvine DRM plugin in Chrome 57 and above. Now it seems that the fine folks at Google are foisting the laughable Flash plugin on people who switched back to Firefox. Wonderful.